The relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and employee attitudes strain and be

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERCEPTIONS OFORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS AND EMPLOYEE ATTITUDES,STRAIN,AND BEHAVIOR:A META-ANALYTIC EXAMINATIONCHU-HSIANG CHANG University of South Florida CHRISTOPHER C.ROSEN University of ArkansasPAUL E.LEVY University of AkronThe current study tested a model that links perceptions of organizational politics to job performance and “turnover intentions”(intentions to quit).Meta-analytic evidence supported significant,bivariate relationships between perceived politics and strain (.48),turnover intentions (.43),job satisfaction (؊.57),affective commitment (؊.54),task performance (؊.20),and organizational citizenship behaviors toward individuals (؊.16)and organizations (؊.20).Additionally,results demonstrated that work atti-tudes mediated the effects of perceived politics on employee turnover intentions and that both attitudes and strain mediated the effects of perceived politics on perfor-mance.Finally,exploratory analyses provided evidence that perceived politics repre-sent a unique “hindrance stressor.”Organizational politics are ubiquitous and have widespread effects on critical processes (e.g.,per-formance evaluation,resource allocation,and man-agerial decision making)that influence organi-zational effectiveness and efficiency (Kacmar &Baron,1999).Employees may engage in some legitimate,organizationally sanctioned political ac-tivities that are beneficial to work groups and or-ganizations (see Fedor,Maslyn,Farmer,&Betten-hausen,2008).For example,managers who are “good politicians”may develop large bases of so-cial capital and strong networks that allow them to increase the resources that are available to their subordinates (Treadway et al.,2004).On the other hand,employees also demonstrate a number of il-legitimate political activities (e.g.,coalition build-ing,favoritism-based pay and promotion decisions,and backstabbing)that are strategically designed to benefit,protect,or enhance self-interests,often without regard for the welfare of their organizationor coworkers (Ferris,Russ,&Fandt,1989).There-fore,organizational politics are often viewed as a dysfunctional,divisive aspect of work environ-ments (Mintzberg,1983).The current article fo-cuses on understanding how employees’percep-tions of illegitimate,self-serving political activities (viz.,perceptions of organizational politics)influ-ence individual-level work attitudes and behaviors.Accumulating empirical research has provided considerable evidence for linkages between percep-tions of organizational politics and a variety of employee outcomes,including job satisfaction,af-fective organizational commitment,and job anxiety (see Ferris,Adams,Kolodinsky,Hochwarter,&Ammeter,2002).However,despite the intuitive ap-peal of the idea that perceived politics will have an impact on key individual-level outcomes associ-ated with organizational effectiveness,research has failed to consistently demonstrate such an impact.For example,Ferris et al.(2002)observed that four of nine studies (e.g.,Cropanzano,Howes,Grandey,&Toth,1997;Hochwarter,Witt,&Kacmar,2000;Parker,Dipboye,&Jackson,1995;Randall,Cropan-zano,Bormann,&Birjulin,1999)relating percep-tions of organizational politics to task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)did not support the expected negative linkages.Simi-larly,four of nine studies (e.g.,Cropanzano et al.,We thank Brad Kirkman and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights.We would like to note that the first two authors contributed equally to this project.We would like to thank Rosalie Hall for her helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.We are also grateful for the assistance of Michelle Matias and Jessica Junak in preparing our manuscript.௠Academy of Management Journal 2009,Vol.52,No.4,779–801.779Copyright of the Academy of Management,all rights reserved.Contents may not be copied,emailed,posted to a listserv,or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written ers may print,download or email articles for individual use only.1997;Harrell-Cook,Ferris,&Dulebohn,1999; Hochwarter,Perrewe,Ferris,&Guercio,1999;Ran-dall et al.,1999)examining linkages between polit-ical perceptions and turnover intentions failed to reach statistical significance(Ferris et al.,2002). Thus,evidence linking perceptions of organization-al politics to these outcomes is equivocal. Moreover,it is not clear whether these inconsis-tent findings exist because of statistical artifacts (e.g.,low power)or because the politics-outcome relationships are not negative.Regarding the latter point,Ferris et al.(1989)noted that employees may respond to perceptions of organizational politics by increasing involvement in their jobs.Ferris et al. (1989)suggested that perceived politics may lead to positive outcomes when they are experienced as opportunity stress(Schuler,1980),which occurs when a stressor presents an opportunity for em-ployees to gain something from the situation at hand.Employees respond to opportunity stress by putting more time and effort into their jobs in an attempt to capitalize on the situation(LePine,Pod-sakoff,&LePine,2005;Schuler,1980).Supporting this perspective,there is evidence that perceptions of organizational politics are associated with desir-able outcomes,including lower strain(Ferris et al., 1993),and increased job involvement(Ferris&Kac-mar,1992)and performance(Maslyn&Fedor, 1998;Rosen,Levy,&Hall,2006).Thus,it is not clear whether inconsistent findings in the literature are a function of study artifacts or exist because perceptions of organizational politics are either not relevant to or positively associated with certain outcomes.In addition,the theoretical underpinnings of the linkages between perceptions of organizational pol-itics and job performance and turnover intentions are not well understood,as existing frameworks do not explain how these perceptions are associated with critical employee outcomes.Rather,concep-tual models(e.g.,Aryee,Chen,&Budhwar,2004; Ferris et al.,2002)specify that perceptions of or-ganizational politics are related directly to em-ployee attitudes and behaviors.Hence,knowledge of the psychological mechanisms that relate politi-cal perceptions to employee outcomes is limited, and there is little guidance for systematically ex-amining these mechanisms.In addition,research has failed to examine mediators that link percep-tions of organizational politics to outcomes.For example,theorists have noted that job stress and social exchange theories may explain reactions to these perceptions(Cropanzano et al.,1997;Ferris et al.,2002).However,the dearth of empirical re-search examining the linkages implied by these theories has limited researchers’ability to deter-mine if one,both,or neither of these explanations accounts for the effects of perceptions of organiza-tional politics.A recent meta-analysis of the outcomes of per-ceptions of organizational politics(see Miller, Rutherford,&Kolodinsky,2008)underscores some of these empirical and theoretical weaknesses in the politics literature.Empirically,Miller et al.’s (2008)results failed to clearly support a linkage between perceptions of organizational politics and performance.Moreover,their study(1)did not present an overarching theoretical framework that explains why perceived organizational politics is linked to employee attitudes and behaviors and(2) focused only on bivariate linkages between the con-struct and its outcomes,without considering how outcomes of perceptions of organizational politics relate to one another.The current research ad-dresses these shortcomings of the literature on per-ceptions of organizational politics in three ways. First,this study provides a comprehensive,quanti-tative review of the relationships between per-ceived organizational politics and its outcomes. Meta-analysis allowed estimation of the true pop-ulation effect size(Hunter&Schmidt,2004)and examination of whether study characteristics ex-plain variability in effect sizes.Thus,a meta-ana-lytic examination of the perceptions of organiza-tional politics–outcome relationships is important because it helps determine whether the past incon-sistent findings were the result of statistical arti-facts or,rather,were associated with a broader is-sue,such as the misspecification of relationships between perceptions of organizational politics and its outcomes.Second,and perhaps more importantly,the cur-rent study focuses on developing and testing a the-oretically derived model that identifies the key psy-chological mechanisms that link perceived organizational politics to its distal outcomes.Fig-ure1outlines the proposed model,which inte-grates the organizational politics literature with theoretical frameworks that specify the causal or-dering of stress-related outcomes(Podsakoff, LePine,&LePine,2007;Schaubroeck,Cotton,& Jennings,1989).This approach is consistent with previous studies(LePine et al.,2005;Podsakoff et al.,2007)that have cast organizational politics as a hindrance stressor that prevents employees from meeting personal and professional goals.We tested the validity of the proposed model using meta-analytically derived correlations.Thus,the contri-bution of our meta-analysis is enhanced by its abil-ity to not only provide information on the strength of the bivariate relationships between constructs,780AugustAcademy of Management Journalbut also explain how the focal constructs are related (Viswesvaran &Ones,1995).Finally,we explore whether perceptions of or-ganizational politics can be distinguished from other hindrance stressors.Although some research-ers have argued that it is best to treat various stres-sors as distinct yet related constructs (Schaubroeck et al.,1989),the hindrance stressor literature im-plies that perceptions of organizational politics,role ambiguity,and role conflict are all indicators of a higher-order hindrance stressor factor (LePine et al.,2005;Podsakoff et al.,2007).Thus,we con-ducted exploratory analyses to compare relation-ships among perceptions of organizational politics,role stressors,and outcomes and to evaluate mod-els based on different conceptualizations of the hindrance stressor construct.BACKGROUND AND THEORYTheorists have provided two explanations that link perceptions of organizational politics to nega-tive work outcomes.First,Ferris et al.(1989)sug-gested that politics are a source of stress that elicits strain responses from employees.Other theorists have suggested that perceptions of organizational politics are detrimental to the maintenance of healthy employee-organization exchange relation-ships (Aryee et al.,2004;Hall,Hochwarter,Ferris,&Bowen,2004).Below,we review these explana-tions of the effects of perceived organizational pol-itics and apply Schaubroeck et al.’s (1989)frame-work of work stress to tie these perspectives together.Finally,we develop a model based on the hindrance stressor literature to link perceptions ofFIGURE 1Proposed and Alternative Models of Effects of Perceptions of Organizational Politics onEmployeeOutcomes2009781Chang,Rosen,and Levyorganizational politics to proximal(strain and atti-tudes)and distal(performance and turnover inten-tions)outcomes.Stress-Based Effects of Perceptions of Organizational PoliticsDrawing on research conceptualizing job stress as a subjective experience associated with uncer-tainty and ambiguity(e.g.,Schuler,1980),Ferris et al.(1989)proposed that perceptions of organiza-tional politics represent a stressor that is directly related to attitudinal and behavioral reactions.Fer-ris et al.speculated that perceptions of organiza-tional politics trigger a primary appraisal(Lazarus &Folkman,1984)that a work context is threatening and put pressure on employees to engage in poli-ticking to meet their goals.Highly political organi-zations tend to reward employees who(1)engage in strong influence tactics,(2)take credit for the work of others,(3)are members of powerful coalitions, and(4)have connections to high-ranking allies.As organizations reward these activities,demands are placed on workers to engage in political behaviors to compete for resources.According to the job de-mands–resource model of work stress(Demerouti, Bakker,Nachreiner,&Schaufeli,2001),employees who perceive that job demands exceed their coping resources feel overwhelmed.This emotional strain requires additional coping efforts,which are taken away from resources that could otherwise be de-voted to job performance.Excessive strain also im-pacts employee health(Dragano,Verde,&Siegrist, 2005)and eventually drives employees to search for less stressful work environments.A Social Exchange Perspective on the Effects of Perceptions of Organizational PoliticsIn highly political organizations,rewards are tied to relationships,power,and other less objective factors.As a result,“the immediate environment becomes unpredictable because the unwritten rules for success change as the power of those playing the political game varies”(Hall et al.,2004:244). Therefore,it is difficult for employees to predict if their behaviors will lead to rewards in political work contexts,and they are likely to perceive weaker relationships between performance and the attainment of desired outcomes(Aryee et al.,2004; Cropanzano et al.,1997).Supporting this perspec-tive,Rosen et al.(2006)demonstrated that percep-tions of organizational politics are associated with performance through employee morale.In their study,as in the present study,employee morale and job performance were conceptualized as aggre-gate latent constructs.The morale construct repre-sented general employee attitudes and was com-prised of job satisfaction and affective commitment (see Harrison,Newman,&Roth,2006),and the performance construct consisted of task perfor-mance and OCB(see Rotundo&Sackett,2002), which captured behaviors related to both the tech-nical cores of organizations and behaviors that con-tribute to the psychosocial contexts of workplaces (Organ,1997).Rosen et al.(2006)suggested that lower morale reflects judgments that reward allo-cation processes are arbitrary and unfair.Employ-ees holding less favorable attitudes also feel less obligated to reciprocate with behaviors that en-hance the well-being of their organization.Thus, Rosen et al.provided evidence,albeit indirectly, that morale is part of the social exchange mecha-nism that links perceptions of organizational poli-tics to performance.Current Study:Model and HypothesesThe stress and social exchange perspectives are useful to understanding reactions to perceptions of organizational politics.Nonetheless,research falls short in describing the mechanisms that link such perceptions to outcomes.For example,Ferris et al.’s(2002)model specifies that job anxiety,job satisfaction,affective commitment,performance, and turnover intentions are direct outcomes of per-ceptions of organizational politics,with each reac-tion occurring at the same time.However,there are reasons to believe that some reactions to political perceptions precede others.In particular,work stress research(Schaubroeck et al.,1989)suggests that job anxiety,job satisfaction,and affective com-mitment are antecedents to turnover intentions and performance.Therefore,we suggest that percep-tions of organizational politics have indirect effects on turnover intentions and performance through more immediate outcomes(viz.,strain and morale). As such,previous studies examining only the di-rect effects of perceptions of organizational politics on performance and turnover intentions may have misspecified these linkages,thus biasing the study results(Duncan,1975).The stress and social exchange perspectives em-ploy a similar logic useful for understanding em-ployees’reactions to perceptions of organizational politics.Particularly,both perspectives suggest that these perceptions are associated with ambiguity and uncertainty in a work environment that results in psychological strain and lower morale.However, neither perspective describes how these outcomes of perceptions of organizational politics relate to each other and whether these outcomes have a782AugustAcademy of Management Journalmeaningful impact on more distal reactions.Fortu-nately,the work stress literature provides insight regarding the causal ordering of these reactions to stressors.Following Mobley,Horner,and Holling-sworth’s(1978)model of turnover,Schaubroeck et al.(1989)specified that role stressors lead to in-creased job strain,which is associated with lower job satisfaction and affective commitment and,sub-sequently,increased turnover intentions.Podsakoff et al.(2007)and LePine et al.(2005)employed similar mediational chains to explain the effects of hindrance stressors on turnover and task perfor-mance.Moreover,Cropanzano,Rupp,and Byrne (2003)demonstrated that the effects of strain work through morale and impact OCBs,in addition to task performance.Together,these studies provide complementary approaches to understanding the effects of stressors.We incorporate these perspectives into a model that conceptualizes perceptions of organizational politics as a hindrance stressor reflecting job de-mands that interfere with employees’ability to achieve career goals.Hindrance stressors are broadly defined as constraints that impede individ-uals’work achievements and are not usually asso-ciated with potential net gains for them(LePine et al.,2005).In addition to perceptions of organiza-tional politics,researchers include role stressors, bureaucracy,and daily hassles under the umbrella of hindrance stressors.Collectively,research has shown that these stressors elicit strain,reduce mo-rale,motivation,and performance,and increase employee withdrawal(Boswell,Olson-Buchanan, &LePine,2004;Cavanaugh,Boswell,Roehling,& Boudreau,2000;Podsakoff et al.,2007).In keeping with previous research examining the effects of perceptions of organizational politics and hin-drance stressors,we argue that politics hamper em-ployees’ability to attain personal and professional goals,which results in a primary appraisal of the work context that evokes strain and reduces mo-rale.In accordance with the causal ordering sup-ported by previous studies,we also propose that strain is a more proximal outcome than morale. This proposition derives from both the stress and social exchange perspectives.Work stress research-ers(Schaubroeck et al.,1989)have suggested that psychological strain influences employees’overall attitudes toward their jobs,as employees consider their jobs to be the root of the problem.Strain is also purported to reflect a negative evaluation of the employee-organization exchange relationship (Cropanzano et al.,1997).Thus,as strain increases, employees’morale and sense of obligation toward their organization decline(Cropanzano et al., 2003).We propose that perceptions of organizational politics have both direct and indirect effects on morale.In turn,psychological strain and morale link perceptions of organizational politics to more distal outcomes.In other words,employees’perfor-mance suffers because they must focus time and effort on coping with the strain associated with perceptions of organizational politics.In addition, employees are likely to reduce the time and effort that they put into their jobs in response to per-ceived disequilibrium in the exchange relation-ship,which is reflected by lower morale.Finally, employees will attempt to remove themselves from situations appraised as unfavorable or threatening. In summary,we hypothesize the following: Hypothesis 1.Perceptions of organizational politics has a positive relationship with psy-chological strain.Hypothesis 2.Perceptions of organizational politics has a(a)direct negative relationship with morale(b)partially mediated by psycho-logical strain.Hypothesis 3.Perceptions of organizational politics has a positive relationship with turn-over intentions.Hypothesis 4.Perceptions of organizational politics has a negative relationship with job performance.Hypothesis5.The relationship between per-ceptions of organizational politics and turn-over intentions is mediated by(a)psychologi-cal strain and(b)morale.Hypothesis6.The relationship between per-ceptions of organizational politics and job per-formance is mediated by(a)psychological strain and(b)morale.Exploratory Analyses:Comparing Politics to Other Hindrance StressorsIn Schaubroeck et al.’s(1989)model,role ambi-guity and role conflict represent distinct,yet re-lated,stressors.More recently,researchers(e.g., LePine et al.,2005;Podsakoff et al.,2007)have suggested that a unified hindrance stressor con-struct encompasses perceptions of organizational politics and role stressors.Perceived politics and role stressors certainly share the similarity of inter-fering with employees’ability to achieve personal and professional goals.However,conceptualizing these three constructs as indicators of a unified hindrance stressor construct entails an assumption that perceptions of organizational politics and role2009783Chang,Rosen,and Levystressors are analogous and demonstrate similar re-lationships with each other and with outcomes. Unfortunately,this assumption has not been empir-ically tested.Therefore,we provide supplemental analyses that,first,compare relationships among perceptions of organizational politics,role stres-sors,and outcomes,and second,explore whether political perceptions and role stressors are best conceptualized as a unified construct or as a set of diversified yet related stressors.Figure2graphi-cally depicts these two contrasting patterns.Third, our additional analyses also explore whether per-ceptions of organizational politics and role stres-sors demonstrate similar patterns of relationships with distal outcomes.Similar relationships with each other and with outcomes and a better-fitting model based on a unified hindrance stressor con-struct would provide further evidence for the uni-fied approach(Podsakoff et al.,2007).On the other hand,differing relationship patterns and a better fit for the diversified model would imply that percep-tions of organizational politics may have meaning-ful differences with other role-based hindrance stressors.Research Question.Are perceptions of organi-zational politics and role stressors(role ambi-guity and role conflict)distinct forms of hin-drance stressors?METHODSLiterature Search and Inclusion CriteriaTo identify studies that could be used in this meta-analysis,we first conducted a computerized search of three databases(PSYCINFO,ABI-INFORM, and Business Source Premier)for the years between 1989(the year that Ferris and colleagues proposed the perceptions of organizational politics con-struct)and2007.We combined keywords associ-ated with politics(i.e.,“organizational politics,”“politics perceptions,”and“perceived politics”) with keywords related to outcomes(general out-comes:“outcome,”“consequence,”and“result”; strain1:“strain,”“stress,”“stressor,”“anger,”“anx-iety,”“depress[ion],”“frustration,”“tension,”and “burnout”;morale:“job/work satisfaction,”“organ-izational/work commitment,”“affective commit-ment”;turnover intentions:“turnover,”“intent to turnover,”“withdrawal cognitions”;supervisor-rated performance:“performance,”“productivity,”“task/job performance,”“organizational citizen-ship behavior,”“OCB,”“OCBI”[OCB toward indi-viduals],“OCBO”[OCB toward organizations],and “contextual performance”).Second,we manually searched the1989–2007issues of eight high-qual-ity journals that have published articles related to organizational politics:the Academy of Manage-ment Journal,Journal of Applied Psychology,Jour-nal of Management,Journal of Organizational Behavior,Journal of Vocational Behavior,Organi-zational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Science,and Personnel Psychology. Third,we compared the reference list derived from the sources described so far with the lists of two qualitative reviews of research on perceptions of organizational politics(Ferris et al.,2002;Kacmar &Baron,1999).Finally,we contacted researchers in the field for“file-drawer studies”and posted a call for unpublished papers on discussion lists for the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychol-ogy and the Academy of Management.In total,we identified57relevant papers dealing with70sep-arate samples that we could include in the meta-analyses.Three inclusion criteria were used.First,we in-cluded studies in the meta-analysis if they investi-gated relationships between perceptions of organi-zational politics and at least one of the dependent variables.Second,we included studies that mea-sured politics perceptions and excluded studies that measured other operationalizations of organi-zational politics.The majority of studies used vari-ations of the perceptions of organizational politics measure(Kacmar&Ferris,1991);three exceptions were Anderson(1994),Christiansen,Villanova, and Mikulay(1997),and Drory(1993).Kacmar and Baron’s(1999)qualitative review suggested that the three scales in those studies assess perceptions of organizational political climate.In addition,our own content analysis revealed that items from these scales have counterparts in the perceptions of organizational politics measure.Thus,we included these in the current meta-analysis.2Finally,we in-cluded studies reporting relationships between perceptions of organizational politics and depen-1Two-thirds of the samples we found(14out of21) used the Work Tension Scale by House and Rizzo(1972) to assess psychological strain associated with tension experienced at work.2We also conducted meta-analyses without these studies for the applicable analyses and found the results showed minor,nonsignificant fluctuations.After remov-ing these studies,we observed these changes in relation-ships:(a)perceptions of organizational politics and strain,from.48to.47;(b)politics and job satisfaction, fromϪ.57toϪ.58;(c)politics and affective commitment, fromϪ.54toϪ.55;and(d)politics and withdrawal in-tentions,from.43to.44.784AugustAcademy of Management Journaldent variables that were calculated from an original sample.When the same sample was used in multi-ple studies,sample characteristics and effect sizes were cross-referenced,and only one effect size was included.Correlations were considered as separate entries when they represented relationships be-FIGURE 2Conceptualizations of HindranceStressor2009785Chang,Rosen,and Levytween perceptions of organizational politics and(1) distinctive outcome variables and(2)one depen-dent variable,but from different samples(Arthur, Bennett,&Huffcutt,2001).We aggregated correla-tions representing relationships between percep-tions of organizational politics and different mea-sures of the same outcome variable.These criteria resulted in21effect sizes for strain,45for job satisfaction,33for affective commitment,27for turnover intentions,14for task performance,9for OCBI,and9for OCBO.Meta-analytic and Model-Testing ProceduresWe first used meta-analysis to summarize rela-tionships between perceptions of organizational politics and each of the outcome variables.When available,we also examined whether the publica-tion status of a study,the employment status of the sampled population(full-time employees vs.em-ployed students),and the country from which the data were collected,accounted for differences in effect sizes among studies.Following Arthur et al.’s (2001)strategy,we calculated a sample-weighted mean correlation.We then computed the percent-age of variance accounted for by sampling error (Hunter&Schmidt,2004)and performed the chi-square test for the homogeneity of observed corre-lation coefficients across studies(Rosenthal,1991). The95%confidence interval around the sample-weighted mean correlation was then computed us-ing different formulas depending on chi-square test results(Whitener,1990).We then corrected for un-reliability of measures to derive the population cor-relation coefficient.We used interrater reliability estimates from Viswesvaran,Ones,and Schmidt (1996)to correct for measurement error in the rela-tionships between perceptions of organizational politics and supervisor-rated performance.The variance and standard deviation of the population estimate were then calculated to determine the 95%credibility interval.We also calculated the Q-statistic to examine variance in the corrected population estimate.When the credibility interval included zero or Q was significant,we performed subgroup analyses to examine the moderating ef-fects of study characteristics(Cortina,2003).The moderator analyses included an examination of both publication status and sample employment status,as well as a cross-cultural comparison be-tween U.S.and Israeli samples,none of which were examined in Miller et al.’s(2008)meta-analysis of the outcomes of perceptions of organizational politics.Next,we built a correlation matrix containing the corrected population correlation coefficients be-tween all the variables using the current and pre-vious meta-analytic results.Selected meta-analyses published since1995provided estimates for rela-tionships among nonpolitics variables.Table1pre-sents this correlation matrix.We performed struc-tural equation modeling(SEM)based on this correlation matrix to evaluate the fit of the pro-posed model.We adopted Shadish(1996)and Vi-swesvaran and Ones’s(1995)procedures for model testing.Unless otherwise noted,the structural model used manifest indicators without correction for measurement error,as these corrections were done through meta-analysis.Finally,because no published meta-analysis estimates the relation-ships between turnover intentions and OCBI and OCBO,we used primary studies found for the cur-rent meta-analysis to estimate these relationships (see Harrison et al.,2006).Specifically,seven of the nine samples that we found in our meta-analysis for the relationships between perceptions of organ-izational politics and OCBI and OCBO included turnover intentions as an outcome variable.Rela-tionships between turnover intentions and OCBs were extracted from these seven studies and meta-analyzed to provide estimates for the meta-analytic correlation matrix.For the exploratory analyses,we performed an additional literature search for meta-analytic corre-lations involving role stressors(i.e.,role ambiguity and role conflict)and the outcome variables in-cluded in the current study(e.g.,O¨rtqvist&Win-cent,2006;Podsakoff,MacKenzie,&Bommer, 1996).We then incorporated these correlations into the meta-analytic correlation matrix(Table1)and tested the proposed model using the two different conceptualizations of the hindrance stressor con-struct(i.e.,as a unified vs.diversified construct). Because no published meta-analysis estimated the relationships between perceptions of organization-al politics and the two role stressors,we used avail-able primary studies to estimate these relationships (six effect sizes for the perceptions of organization-al politics–role ambiguity relationship[␳ϭ.52]; four effect sizes for the perceptions of organiza-tional politics–role conflict relationship[␳ϭ.58]).RESULTSBivariate RelationshipsTable2shows the results of the meta-analysis for the relationships between politics and strain,job satisfaction,affective commitment,turnover inten-tions,task performance,OCBI,and OCBO.All of the95%confidence intervals excluded zero,indi-cating that each correlation was statistically signif-786AugustAcademy of Management Journal。